I first pursued "AI" in undergrad during the last AI winter. For example, the only professor who taught neural networks at Purdue was in the EE dept, not CS, and was retiring the semester I was first qualified to study it. There weren't enough seats in the class, and since it was graduate level, I wasn't allowed to take it as an undergrad.

I really tried every avenue I could think of at the time to pursue AI — taking part in Robocup, taking classical AI (also from the EE dept), etc. None of what I was exposed to seemed like it was pushing the the intellectual boundaries, so I instead got into video game AI as a way to pursue AI (a number of famous ML researchers like Demis Hassabis got their start in video games).

When I started my PhD a very tiny group of researchers were looking at text generation, let alone for creative text. The idea was very niche.

Note, I only pursued a PhD after I got an interview at OpenAI in 2017 that made me realize a PhD was likely necessary to pursue research.